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Magill’s Literary Annual 2005

For Us, the Living

by Stefan Dziemianowicz

First published: 2004

Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York). 263 pp. $25.00

Type of work: Novel

Time of work: 2086

Locale: Reno and Lake Tahoe, Nevada

Perry Nelson awakens from a car crash which occurs in 1939 to discover that he has been magically transported a century-and-a-half into the future to an America whose utopian society poses challenges to his early twentieth century mind-set

For Us, the Living is the story of a man who finds himself miraculously translated from the time of his normal existence to a future many years hence. The circumstances under which this novel was published bear more than a passing resemblance to its fantasy premise. For Us, the Living is the first novel written by Robert A. Heinlein, an enormously influential writer of science fiction and the first writer of genre science fiction to crack the fiction best-seller list. Heinlein wrote the novel in 1938, while an as-yet-unpublished author and shopped it around to several publishers who rejected it. He shelved the manuscript, but within a year he was publishing regularly in science-fiction magazines. Although the book’s existence was long known about, a copy of the manuscript did not surface until 2003. Thus, Heinlein’s “first” novel finally saw publication sixty-six years after it was written.

Robert A. Heinlein

ph_0111226241-Heinlein.jpg

(Courtesy, Heinlein Centennial Inc.)

It is easy to see why For Us, the Living did not find favor with publishers in the 1930’s and why Heinlein chose not to bring it out of the trunk once he was an established writer. Although a work of speculative fiction, it is not a novel but rather a tract with a political agenda. Four years before he wrote it, Heinlein had been actively involved in Upton Sinclair’s failed run for the governorship of California on the Democratic ticket. Involvement in politics led Heinlein himself to a failed run for the California state assembly in 1938. The future utopia depicted in the book is clearly built from planks of the author’s progressive political campaign. For Us, the Living is a fine example of an author writing what he knows, but Heinlein was still new to the literary craft and had yet to master the nuances of fiction writing. The novel’s characters relate the history of their world and the principles on which their society is founded in lengthy, sometimes pedantic, monologues. In time, Heinlein would find more creative ways to allow “back story” details of this kind to emerge naturally through plot and character development.

Although For Us, the Living reads more like an essay than a novel, it is an important book for understanding Heinlein’s oeuvre and for appreciating the design and objectives of utopian fiction. As Robert James notes in his afterword, the novel is very much in the tradition of the best-known utopian tales of its time, notably Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), both of which feature characters who are magically transported more than a century into the future to a world that has rationally overcome the problems of their times. In Heinlein’s tale, Perry Nelson, an engineer in the year 1939, awakens after a car crash and finds himself in the year 2086. Although Perry died, his consciousness has transmigrated to the body of Gordon 775-82, a psychologist who specialized in the study of extrasensory perception. He is rescued from a snowstorm by Diana 400-48, a young, single woman who is renowned as a dancer on television.

In the days that follow, Diana and her friends get Perry up to speed on the previous 148 years of history to help him understand the political and social changes that have made the world an idealized descendant of the place he knew. Perry and Diana become lovers, which causes problems when Perry punches her dance partner, Bernard, for taking what he considers liberties during a rehearsal. Violence of this type is “a major atavism” unheard of in the late twenty-first century, and Perry is given a choice of self-exile in Coventry, a reservation for persons who do not fit in with society, or psychiatric rehabilitation. He chooses the latter and is eventually cured of his possessive jealousy with the help of Olga, a psychiatrist who becomes his lover as well. The “realistic thinking” therapy Perry undergoes has an unexpected dividend when it helps engage him in modern aeronautics. The novel ends with Perry embarking on an exploratory trip to the far side of the moon.

Like most futuristic tales, For Us, the Living presents a world that differs markedly from modern times. Superficially, civilization in the year 2086 is distinguished by technologic advances common to genre science fiction. Apartments are outfitted with locks keyed to the owner’s voice. People can remotely access library archives from wall consoles in their homes and view audiovisual tapes on the equivalent of a videocassette recorder. The televue, a two-way audiovisual system, and the telautograph, a forerunner of the fax machine, make it possible for people to conduct significant business without ever leaving their homes. Diana speaks the same language as Perry, but vocabulary has changed slightly to more phonetic spellings of certain words. Science fiction of the 1930’s was prone to enthusiastic overestimates of how rapidly the look of civilization would change in a short time as a result of scientific progress, but Heinlein wisely keeps the differences to a minimum. Some standard science fiction flourishes are unavoidable: Rocketry is common for long distance travel, and in cities roadways and sidewalks are automated so that people do not have to walk.

More interesting than the superficial science fiction of this story is its social and philosophical underpinnings. For most of his career, Heinlein was renowned for his Future History series, a loose schematic that extended to the twenty-second century and provided a framework for most of the fiction that he wrote up to 1960. In the fourth chapter of For Us, the Living, he offers a meticulous future history of the United States after 1939. It begins with Franklin Roosevelt’s third term as president, which precipitates the collapse of the Democratic Party and hastens the ascendance of the National Progressive Party. It then proceeds through the rise of a right-wing Republican president who loses the popular vote but wins the office in the electoral college; a succeeding Republican presidency that preserves its power by muzzling the press and declaring a state of emergency to justify putting down agitating mobs of the unemployed; and a war with South America that results in the nuclear devastation of Manhattan. In the same interval, Europe is united under the leadership of the formerly deposed Edward, duke of Windsor, and its nations adopt a common currency until civil war rages on the continent between 1970 and 2010, wiping out 375 million people and prompting the United States to sever all communications. Finally, in the mid-twenty-first century, evangelist Nehemiah Scudder leads a fundamentalist crusade that establishes a short-lived but brutally repressive theocracy that is finally dismantled by a populist uprising and the adoption of a Libertarian doctrine.

Some of the details of this extrapolated future are eerily prescient, others farfetched, but in general they show a keen understanding on Heinlein’s part of the cultural and political currents that shape a society. Above all, they articulate his perception of the flaws inherent in the American political system of 1938 and the panacea that he believed Libertarianism offered. Heinlein so believed in the fundamentals of the Libertarian credo that his future Americans amend the Constitution in 2028 to guarantee that “Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another.” Thus, in Heinlein’s rational Libertarian future, social taboos that once were imposed and regulated by churches and special interest groups have been exploded. Marriage is a social contract with no religious or legal stipulations. Nudism is allowed without restriction (leading to some awkward and embarrassing moments for Perry as he tries to shed his latent twentieth century Puritanism). The traditional nuclear family has expanded to include lovers and the children of multiple relationships.

The government is virtually absent from people’s lives except in one key regard: All citizens are granted a monthly stipend that guarantees them self-sufficiency and freedom from work if they so choose. This policy is the ultimate trickle-down from the deprivatization of banks in the latter half of the twentieth century, which came about, in part, to redress the lingering problems of the Great Depression: specifically the overproduction of goods that made it impossible for Americans on pay scales of the day to be efficient consumers. This system of Social Credit betrays the origins of Heinlein’s fable in the progressive politics of the New Deal. It also explains why Heinlein took his title from the line in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which reads: “It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work for which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Prevented from proving the validity of his political beliefs in the real world, Heinlein undertook to carry them to fruition in his fiction.

Heinlein’s sincerity in his belief that the politics of the future could be made a reality is unassailable. When Perry agrees to psychiatric counseling after his assault of Diana’s dance partner, his rehabilitation takes the form of therapy to overcome “psychological blocks” that manifest as jealous possessiveness. This involves little more than his being shown that there are discrepancies between his understanding of certain broad concepts—love, patriotism, justice, society, right, and wrong—and a universal definition that would be understood by others. Perry must shake free the social and psychological conditioning that has narrowed his perspective if he is to integrate himself with his new society. Here, as throughout the novel, Perry is primarily a proxy for twentieth century Americans, whom Heinlein urges to shake free the prevailing political mind-set and see the utopian possibilities of progressive political policies.

In his introduction, Spider Robinson writes of For Us, the Living that it is not Heinlein’s first novel, but rather “all of them.” In the years after Heinlein shelved this amateur effort he would carve ideas and themes from it for landmark stories in his Future History series. The mobile roadways he envisioned would play an important political function in his story “The Roads Must Roll” (1940). The concept of Coventry would give rise to a story of the same name in 1940 and one of the most important of Heinlein’s explorations of the limits of governmental influence and the obligation of the individual to society. For his short novel If This Goes On (1940), Heinlein inverted the structure of For Us, the Living to write a dystopia of America in the dark ages of Nehemiah Scudder’s theocracy. Other Heinlein stories abound with references to characters and incidents in this novel and resonances with its ideas. For Us, the Living is not as well written as most of the science fiction Heinlein produced after it, but to the extent that Heinlein’s fiction was an important influence on science fiction in its day and on readers and writers who realized from reading it that the fiction could serve as a literature of ideas about society and culture as much as about science, this “first novel” may be one of the most important for popular fiction in the twentieth century.

Review Sources

1 

Booklist 100, no. 8 (December 15, 2003): 734.

2 

Fantasy and Science Fiction 107, no. 1 (July, 2004): 31.

3 

The Heinlein Journal, no. 14 (January, 2004).

4 

Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 22 (November 15, 2003), p. 1344.

5 

Library Journal 129, no. 1 (January 15, 2004): 168.

6 

Locus 52 (January, 2004): 19.

7 

New York Review of Science Fiction 16 (March, 2004): 1.

8 

Publishers Weekly 250, no. 46 (November 17, 2003): 49.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. "For Us, The Living." Magill’s Literary Annual 2005, edited by John D. Wilson & Steven G. Kellman, Salem Press, 2005. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MLA2005_10590300302512.
APA 7th
Dziemianowicz, S. (2005). For Us, the Living. In J. D. Wilson & S. G. Kellman (Eds.), Magill’s Literary Annual 2005. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. "For Us, The Living." Edited by John D. Wilson & Steven G. Kellman. Magill’s Literary Annual 2005. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2005. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.